This invention relates to a heart monitoring device and, more particularly, to a device for the concurrent measurement and display of pulse rate and variations thereof.
Electronic equipment is employed today in hospitals and other health-care institutions for the monitoring of a person's heart activity. One important measurement parameter is the rate of occurrence of heart pulsations. In a healthy person, the pulse rate is substantially uniform throughout the duration of a person's activity, the rate varying with changes in the person's activity when the heart may be called upon to pump at a higher or lower rate. Thus, it is readily appreciated that devices for the measuring of pulse rate are most useful in the detection and treatment of disease. The measurement process may necessitate complex electronic equipment, the complexity of the measurement process depending upon the pattern of the heart pulsations.
The monitoring of a person's pulse rate can be a complex process due to variations in the pulse rate. In a person suffering from a heart ailment, for example, a heart ailment characterized by an irregular beat known as arrhythmia, a problem arises in that a single numerical value of pulse rate does not adequately describe the heartbeat pattern. A set of numerical values is most useful for describing the percentage of beats that occur at each of various pulse rates that may be observed. The numerical values can be expressed as a frequency of occurrence of heart beats, or as an interval of time between successive heart beats. In addition, the heart beat should be monitored during a person's regular activity so that information can be gathered over an extended period of time. Such extended observation, which could be accomplished if it were possible for a patient to wear a monitoring device, would provide a more complete and useful description of the patient's condition.
A further problem is found in the electronic equipment used to monitor the heart beats. The equipment employed in hospitals has the usual form of laboratory test equipment which is clearly too big and too heavy to be worn and carried about by a patient. Additional electronic circuitry to provide data analysis would make equipment even more difficult to carry about. Thus, existing equipment militates against the continuous wearing of electronic equipment and, therefore, inhibits the gathering of data during a person's normal daily activity. As a result, the physician attending a patient is denied useful data which would allow for better health care.